Washington, D.C.
October 14-16, 1998
Staffing for the Digital Era: Questions and Discussion
MR. KOBULNICKY: Do we have any questions from the floor?
MS. BUTLER (SUNY-Albany): I’d like to ask Dr. Schement, on the intriguing 28 percent difference in graduation rate between black and white students at Penn State. Are you doing anything to look at that in relation to the family income? It strikes me that that might be a significant variable.
DR. SCHEMENT: I should preface my response by saying I’m not a Pennsylvanian. I’m a South Texan. So when I moved to Pennsylvania, it struck me as a place like I’d never been. The ethnic differences are quite dramatic. It is a place of out-migration and has been a place of out-migration for about 60 or 70 years. And State College, where the main campus of Penn State is located, is about as inaccessible from any major metropolitan area as you can get.
The African-Americans who live in Pennsylvania don’t live near State College. We think some of the issue is simply wanting to graduate at a main campus and arriving at this main campus and finding a very alien environment. And in some ways, I have found it a very alien environment. I’d never bought such lousy tortillas in my entire life.
(Laughter.)
DR. SCHEMENT: But on top of that, there is a cultural base which I’m discovering which is very rich in Germanic and Protestant Irish traditions which are very, very interesting. But I can see that a 19 or 20-year old kid from North Philadelphia who shows up there is going to find himself having to grapple with some issues.
Now, to Penn State’s credit, I think they put a lot of money in trying to retain students. And they have moved to a concept of diversity which I endorse, specifically that diversity is as much about the coal miner’s daughter as it is about the kid from North Philadelphia who thought he was going to be a great basketball star but now knows that he isn’t.
MS. BUTLER: I guess my question is not specific to Penn State but rather that gap in the national averages as well. And it strikes me that universities have forgotten their voice in national policy about that economic difference.
DR. SCHEMENT: I’m just going to speak as one person. It seems to me that universities have been chilled in part by the recent debates surrounding diversity and affirmative action. And if they’re finding their voice, I haven’t heard it yet. But that voice has to be there. If we don’t find our voices about a vision of what we mean by a diverse American society, we will have a diverse American society, but we might not be part of it.
MR. GHERMAN (Vanderbilt): This is a question for the first two panelists. I know of two CIO’s in the last month who are either looking or have left their job. And it’s primarily because they’re offered impossible jobs with probably little support from their administrations or those administrations are not risk takers, yet they tell the people to take risks and make these changes.
It seems to me that retention of CIOs is an issue. They move so often. However, it may not be for career paths, but because they’re put in situations that they can’t function in. I’m wondering if you’ve found that to be true, too?
MR. BAKER: The frustration that the chief technology officer faces is his or her understanding of the reality of what it requires to have a first rate technology organization alongside a lack of understanding and/or lack of ability of a university president to meet those expectations. Literally, we are talking about millions and millions of dollars. We could fund an information technology organization larger than many colleges and universities in their entirety.
That is why I mentioned boards. Governing boards are getting more involved, trustees and regents. They have to. To use Mary Opperman’s phrase, we are clearly going to have to think outside the box. I am finding more and more university people telling me I’m ready to move to the corporate environment. One, they’ll double my salary. Two, they have the resources, because they know they have to have the resources.
There are too many institutions still trying to tape together technology organizations and get by with as little as they can, yet describe themselves as state-of-the art to incoming students, young faculty, senior faculty and administrative types. So I think we will see more and not less of this difficult situation.
MS. OPPERMAN: I agree and the only other comment I would make is that we are beginning to find that not just in technology. We find it wherever the organization is being put on the spot to make change, specifically change that requires risk and therefore requires the tolerance for failure which universities—although we all have it in our guiding principles now—do not deal with very well.
You are finding that heavy burn out is beginning to appear. So technology is one area, but there are others as well.
MR. WEDGEWORTH (Illinois): I want to thank Jerry and Jorge for their presentations. I’m always startled by any new data that Jorge brings to us. But I want to ask Mary a question. Could you expand a little bit more on the concept of growing your own talent, because these are fairly large institutions with fairly large student staffs and support staffs. But we haven’t really found a lot of mechanisms for being able to develop our own.
If I came to you as the HR director of my campus, what are the kinds of things that you could tell me that would assist in developing a plan for growing more of our own technical people?
MS. OPPERMAN: I can try. I will say that for places interested in doing this, this is very exciting, because it weaves together solutions to a number of problems. It weaves together the solution to issues of staff turnover, staff morale, and allows changes in clerical jobs to reenergize people who are really dead ended now. If you’re in a rural environment, you know, they dead end and they stay. And that causes a lot of turnover in the people who are coming in to try to make change.
So to the extent you can build or grow your own strategy, it really weaves together a lot of solutions. So if I were advising a unit that wanted to do that, the first thing I would say is you really need to understand the current skill sets. I use the term competencies. Competencies are shorthand. That’s kind of jargon. It really means skills, the talents and the attributes. So it’s more than just hard skills.
It’s also the talents people have and the attributes they bring to the job. You need to have a good understanding of what you currently have there. And then you need a good understanding of what you need. And by doing a current assessment and a future assessment, identify the gaps. It’s in the gap areas that you would provide specific training. And so, one of the failures in human resources has been to try to create training programs that run across a university because they skim across the top of the skill needs. You need to get inside of an organization going through change and really personalize those training plans. So once you know the gaps, my suggestion is that you get right down there and identify the stars, the people you believe can make the jump from where they are to where you need them to be. And then literally personalize training programs.
I would start with five and try to get five people from where they are to where you need them. And I would start with a clerical or a technical person, a lower level exempt, a professional person and maybe a couple of managers and see how they progress. You’re going to need about a year or two depending on the gaps. That’s what I would suggest. Start small but very, very personalized.
MS. CRETH (University of Iowa): I want to thank all three of you. I think you’ve thrown an important challenge out to us. And I guess I'd like to speak more to my colleagues. I've been in this field just short of 30 years, and this is not the first time we have talked about some very difficult issues around recruitment. We’re at a different level of difficulty.
I want to mention a couple of things. It doesn’t really help how well we market our libraries, our positions, our institutions if when we bring candidates onto our campuses, we don’t treat them well. Remember, you usually have more candidates than you have that one person who is going to get the job. The people who don’t get the job don’t hear from you until after the announcement is put out on the network. Then they go out and talk about you. They’re marketing you at that point. They’re talking about our libraries. When you go out to recruit again, people have already heard—we live in a small community. And so, I think we’ve got to look at marketing on how we treat people, including those who are not successful in that particular job.
I also think that the job design issue is very important. We’re academic institutions. We tend to have a little degree inflation. It’s not that sometimes we don’t need two degrees, an MLS and a subject expertise. We sometimes don’t need the MLS. And when it comes to technical positions, we’ve pushed some of our technical positions down into the support classification levels, what we call merit positions. We don’t require any kind of a BA degree, and we have some terrific people. They are home grown. They might go elsewhere in the university, but they’re not as likely to be recruited by one of you to go to your university library or by industry.
I think we need to look at that job design and those inflations of degree requirements, then I think we need to keep talking about the need for good staff training and development programs. And what we do most of the time is talk about it.
It’s time that we provide our staff with the technology to keep up that training, but also to bring people up, as Mary has said. We have got to stop expecting that we’re going to locate people with all the skills and the talents and the expertise that we need. So I think you’ve given us quite a challenge.
I hope we can really talk among ourselves to find some ways to begin to address the challenge to find some, not just small ways to solve these challenges and problems, but some ways that will make a difference, including on the diversity issues. So thank you very much.
MS. OPPERMAN: Let me add just two specific suggestions for those of you who are looking to grow your support staffs. One is computer-based training. If you don’t have it, ask for it, because it is a good way for people to get base-line computer skills right at their desks. And it’s very good for people who have general phobia about computers. The second is consider a partnership with your local community college.
We actually have a formalized partnership with our local community college, and they do our skill-based training for our support staff right up on our campus. And it’s been very successful. It’s been slow to grow, but people are much more comfortable after 25 years of not being in a classroom to go to a program run by our community college than they are to go to one of Cornell’s undergraduate programs with a group of 18-year olds.
MR. BAKER: Let me make one additional comment and emphasize again this marketing concept, particularly in the information field. As I have shared with the committees for several years now, the role of search committees is half analysis and evaluation of prospective candidates. But at least half the role is likewise marketing. I can’t emphasize that enough—keep in mind that these men and women are not looking for jobs. They are in high demand.
They’re well paid. They can walk across the street and get a meaningful increase. You need to be proactive in what you do. You can’t sit and wait. I’m finding that more and more generally. I’ve done 175 searches in higher education. I have never, never had a placement from an ad. My clients spend thousands of dollars in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the result is zipo. Be proactive in what you do.
When people ask me what I do as an executive search consultant, I’ll often respond, “I interrupt people’s lives.” And that’s what I do. To be successful in your various recruitment efforts, you’re going to have to interrupt some lives. Get them interested in who you are, why you do it, why you do it well and get excited about what you’re doing. You are marketers, and there is no field that’s better than yours, the information field, where this needs to happen and must happen. I encourage you to be aggressive in what you do.
MS. BAKER (Washington State University): I’ve worked at six universities, and one of the things that’s most frustrating is that it takes forever for us to do searches. The method by which we do recruiting for higher level positions is through search committees. It can take a year sometimes. And I’m just wondering how much of that culture of how we do searches is impairing our ability to find good people, particularly to bring people from outside higher education into higher education.
MS. OPPERMAN: You don’t have a year.
MS. BAKER: That’s right.
MS. OPPERMAN: The fact is that if you are looking at someone that other people are looking at, they’ll all be gone in a year. So if your search process is extremely lengthy, you do need to have the discussion about shortening it. You can use committees and still have it be briefer. We’ve had to say things like here’s the design of what the search committee is going to be doing. We’re going to have you involved in designing the job, and then we’re going to have you see the finalist.
MR. BAKER: What you really need to do is retain my firm.
(Laughter.)
MR. KOBULNICKY: As I listen to all the questions and comments, I’m reminded of the old saying, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And then I start thinking about our culture.
(Laughter.)
MR. KOBULNICKY: Help me thank our panelist for a very enjoyable presentation.
(Applause.)